“
I find the language fascinating,” Jim wrote home. “The freshness of discovering a language from the speaker’s mouth, without the aid of a textbook, is most stimulating. And an especially interesting feature to me now is the onomatopoeic value of certain words. For example, I heard it said of a free-swinging broken wrist, ‘It goes whi-lang, whi-lang.’ The word has no dictionary meaning, so far as we can discover. Or a lamp flickering goes ‘li-ping, li-ping, tiung, tiung, and dies.’ The word ‘tukluk, tukluk’ describes rapid swallowing and gulping. And there are myriads more.
”
”